Critical Discussion

Toward a Consilient Study of Literature

by Steven Pinker

eople tell stories. All over the world, and probably for as long as
they have existed, people invent characters and recount their fictitious exploits. This apparent frivolity is no small matter in human affairs.
If one were to tally the number of hours and resources spent in enjoying
fiction in all its formsstory-telling, pretend play, myths and legends,
fairy tales, novels, short stories, epic poems, television, movies, theater,
opera, ballads, narrative paintings, jokes, comics, skits, video games, and
pornographyit would surely account for a major portion of peoples
time and a major portion of modern economic activity. Considering the
costs in time, foregone opportunities to engage in practical pursuits,
and the dangers of confusing fantasy with reality, our longing to lose
ourselves in fiction is a big puzzle for anyone seeking to understand
human beings. All the more so from a Darwinian perspective, as one
might have expected natural selection to have weeded out any inclination to engage in imaginary worlds rather than the real one.
Fiction is important not only in the lives of everyday people but
in intellectual life. An acquaintance with major works of fiction has
long been considered essential to being an educated person, and it is
probably a more common university requirement than patently useful
subjects like biology or statistics. Departments of English (and other
The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, edited by Jonathan
Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson; xxvi & 304 pp. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2005, $79.95, $29.95 paper.
Philosophy and Literature, 2007, 31: 161177

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literatures) are often the most star-studded and prominent divisions of

modern colleges and universities, and disproportionate attention has
been given to debates over the content of their curricula. And despite
having had several centuries to get it right, the study of literature in
modern universities strikes many observers (insiders and outsiders alike)
as being in, shall we say, critical conditionpoliticized, sclerotic, and
lacking a progressive agenda.1
The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative tackles both
conundra and calls for a new body of research to address itthe evolutionary analysis of fiction, or Darwinian Lit-Crit. There are many
reasons to believe that connecting literary analysis with evolutionary
psychology is an idea whose time has come. One of the biggest contributions of evolutionary psychology, regardless of which of its theories
one accepts, is to have created new fields of study for aspects of mental
life that preoccupy human beings but that had been almost entirely
neglected by academic psychologytopics like beauty, love, status, food,
sex, religion, war, exchange, morality, music, art, and, as we shall see,
fiction. The fact that many of these preoccupations seem to lack any
biological utility only makes them more intriguing as scientific puzzles.
And it frames a family of empirical hypotheses, namely whether each
of these faculties is an adaptation (a product of Darwinian natural
selection), a by-product of adaptations (sometimes called spandrels),
or the result of genetic drift or other random evolutionary processes.
Fiction in particular offers a precious gift to evolutionary psychology:
the people and events on display in fictive worlds presumably reflect
our species obsessions, and provide an ecologically valid source of data
about what matters to us.
For its part, literary analysis would surely benefit from the latest scientific ideas on human thought, emotion, and social relations. Fiction has
long been thought of as a means of exploring human nature, and the
current stagnation of literary scholarship can be attributed, in part, to
its denial of that truism. The fields commitment to the dogma that the
mind is a blank slate and that all human concerns are social constructions has led it to focus on cultural and historical particulars, banishing the deeper resonances of fiction that transcend time and place.2
And its distrust of science (and more generally, the search for testable
hypotheses and cumulative objective knowledge) has left it, according
to many accounts, mired in faddism, obscurantism, and parochialism.
For all these reasons, evolutionary psychology and literary analysis seem
to be natural companions.

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The Literary Animal is a manifesto for forging this connection, and a

collection of proofs of concept. The essays, all original, are pleasantly
well-written for an academic collection; the writing is consistently clear,
and often stylish. The essays present new ideas and findingsfrom
biology, literary analysis, history, and quantitative surveys, among other
fieldsthat will enlighten anyone interested in literature or the human
animal. And as one would expect from a new and ambitious field, there
are some false starts, and much left to be done.
The book opens with encouragement from three distinguished
godfathers. From biology, E. O. Wilson heralds Darwinian lit-crit as a
fulfillment of his idea of consilience, or the unification of knowledge,
which has long been enjoyed by the sciences, has recently extended to
the social sciences with the help of evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and is now ripe for extension to the humanities and
arts. From literary criticism, Frederick Crews applauds the analytic and
empirical mindset of the new field, with the reservation (which I share)
that evolution is just one of a number of human sciences that will be
needed to achieve a consilient literary scholarship. From fiction writing,
Ian MacEwan celebrates the universal human nature that allows great
literature to be appreciated thousands of miles and thousands of years
from its origin. All three essays are delightful.
The godfathers deplore the current state of academic literary analysis,
and more bad news may be found in the introduction by the editors
(Jonathan Gottschall, an English scholar and evolutionary psychologist,
and David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist), and in a memoir by
the psychoanalyst and science writer Dylan Evans. Gottschall recounts the
idiotic resistance he encountered when proposing his dissertation work
on the evolutionary logic behind characters motives in the lliadhe
was told that this was a form of racism and Nazism, and that he was
permitted to invoke Freud and Lacan in his work but not Darwin. (He
eventually recruited D. S. Wilson and other extra-departmental faculty
as his advisors.) The resistance continued with this book itself, which
was rejected by one academic publisher after another before finding a
home at Northwestern University Press. Evans narrates his gradual disenchantment with the Lacanian psychoanalysis which he was trained in,
and which, together with deconstruction and other flavors of Theory
(feminist, postcolonialist, queer, etc.) now dominate many literature
departments. Three other contributors (the literary critics Joseph Carroll and Brian Boyd, and the philosopher Denis Dutton), have sounded
similar alarms elsewhere.3 Dutton provides this volume with an Afterword

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that reinforces the value of a consilient scholarship for the arts and
briefly introduces some of his own ideas about the evolutionary basis
of visual aesthetics.
Two of the essays try to lay out theories of human nature that can
then be put to use in analyzing fiction. Both authors deserve enormous
credit for the birth of evolutionary lit-crit; D. S. Wilson for rescuing
Gottschall and coediting this volume, Carroll for his monumental 1995
book Evolution and Literary Theory which pretty much invented the field
more than a decade ago. But possibly because neither is a psychologist,
I found their attempts at psychological theory to be the most disappointing parts of this book.
Wilson aims at a middle ground of evolutionary social constructivism in which a process of cultural evolution would parallel the familiar
biological kind. I found the discussion unilluminating for two reasons.
One is that his foil, the extreme evolutionist who denies the existence of
culture, is a figment of the imagination: a straw man for polemicists to
knock down, or a sacrificial lamb for self-described moderates claiming
the middle ground. The other problem is that the superannuated idea
of culture evolving by a counterpart to biological evolution has turned
out to be sterile at best and probably wrong. Wilson invokes (but does
not cite) Richard Dawkinss version of this idea, the theory of memes,
in which stories (and other bits of culture) are inherited, mutated, and
selected like genes. But the theory (which Dawkins himself is more
cautious about) has led to few interesting discoveries in the thirty years
since The Selfish Gene was published; nor have we learned much from
the looser analogies between biological and cultural evolution that
have been bruited for decades. As a number of evolutionary psychologists have pointed out, if cultural evolution means anything more
precise than the co-opting of the word evolution to mean historical
change, the analogy is seriously misleading.4 Ideas, unlike genes, are
not copied across generations with high fidelity, and they dont mutate
by blind, random processes. Rather, they are crafted by a ten-trillionsynapse human brain, guided by its anticipation of how the stories will
affect the similarly complex brains of readers or listeners. The analogy
of cultural change as to biological evolution leaves the human mind
out of the picture entirely. To use an apposite clich, this is like Hamlet
without the Prince of Denmark.
Carroll, in contrast, does offer a theory of how the mind works in the
form of a set of cognitive behavioral systems (what others might call
modules). But his divisions strike me as arbitrary and unmotivated. For

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instance, survival, technology and cognitive activity are each put in

a separate box, despite being heterogeneous categories with enormous
overlap. And they are inexplicably lined up with the emotions fear,
joy, and surprise, respectively. The chapter also thunders against the
pioneers of evolutionary psychology John Tooby and Leda Cosmides for
downplaying the notion of general intelligence, and of individual and
racial differences.5 This, too, struck me as gratuitous. General intelligence is a dimension of variation among individuals (like strength or
health), not a mechanism, so it is unhelpful as an explanation of how
people think and feel. Tooby and Cosmides are skeptical about qualitative
differences among individuals minds, but they certainly acknowledge
quantitative ones (some people are quicker to anger than others, but
no one lacks the emotion of anger altogether), and Carroll offers no
reason to believe otherwise. Nor is it clear why he feels that evolutionary
literary criticism should avail itself of J. Phillippe Rushtons unusual and
blazingly controversial theories about genetic differences in personality
and intelligence between Europeans, Africans, and Asians.
Fortunately, Carrolls polemical preliminaries soon give way to the
heart of the chapter, an application of his views on evolutionary literary
criticism to Pride and Prejudice. Carrolls approach defies simple summary,
but a key idea is that authors implicitly appeal to a universal human
naturenot as a set of laws that determine how characters act, but as
a frame of reference within which observers find meaning in their own
and others actions. In any work of fiction, there are three kinds of
observers trying to do this: the author, the characters, and the reader.
From their distinct vantage points, each may interpret a characters acts
in a different way, and a skillful author exploits the tension among these
perspectives as the story unfolds and information about character and
motives is withheld, revealed, and deliberated. In Pride and Prejudice, the
operative feature of human nature is the psychology of mate choice,
particularly the different weightings that men and women give to youth
and beauty on the one hand and to status, wealth, stability, and ambition on the other. Austin, her protagonists, and her readers struggle
to reconcile these impulses, which direct our passions toward peoples
superficial qualities, with more reflective faculties, which assess peoples
quality of mind and morals.
Carroll dissects the novel with skill and verve, and will make many
readers wish that they had had him as their college English prof. Nonetheless, one is left wondering how essential the evolutionary biology is
to his insights. The mating criteria that obsess the Bennett women may

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reflect universal impulses, but the specifics of the novel depends on the
way that these impulses were exaggerated and codified in their time and
culture. Today, a depiction of a contemporary middle-class family that
worried aloud about finding wealthy husbands for the daughters, and
about their being disgraced by a daughter running off with the son of
a steward, would elicit guffaws, not a flash of recognition. In Pride and
Prejudice, to be sure, these worries are set in tension with other concerns,
but a skeptic could say that the tension is between individual and cultural
demands, not individual and evolutionary ones. Evolutionary impulses
may be more acutely delineated, and thus more indispensable to literary analyses, in stories set in a culture whose values work against them,
rather than in a culture whose values are redundant with them or an
exaggeration of them. In other words, Darwin may be more important
in explaining the ambivalent appeal of wealthy suitors in Sex and the City
than in Pride and Prejudice. The question of whether evolutionary lit-crit
is better suited to low culture or high culture is rarely mentioned in
The Literary Animal (or in the psychology of the arts in general); I will
return to it later.
Three other essays examine genres of fiction that are also built around
human motives which may be illuminated by evolution. The anthropologist Robin Fox suggests that epics and romances (like Gilgamesh, Beowulf,
the Iliad, Le Morte dArthur, and Chanson de Rolande) explore the tension
between male bonding, which unites men in aggressive coalitions, and
emotional ties to their lovers, wives, and families. The common thread
shown by Fox that runs across widely separated cultures and millennia
is eye-opening, and it counters skepticism that any one of these works
is only exploring the contingent values of a particular society.
The literature scholar Marcus Nordlund defends the reality of romantic love as a universal human emotion in the teeth of the dogma among
literary intellectuals that it is a late social construction. From there he
insightfully examines some of the most appealing class of characters in
fiction: the women in Shakespeares romantic comedies. Nordlund suggests that they are depicted in the phase of life (at least in Elizabethan
and similar cultures) in which women were given freest rein to exercise
their faculties of choice and discernment of human character, and in
which some of the contradictions of human nature are most flagrantly
on display, namely during courtship.
The evolutionary psychologist Catherine Salmon, resisting the pull
among academics toward examining high culture, contrasts the visual
pornography consumed by men with the romance novels consumed by

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women. (The latter includes the bizarre subgenre of slash fiction, which
has nothing to do with chainsaw-wielding maniacs but rather consists
of amateur stories about romantic couplings between pop-culture male
duos like Kirk/Spock and Starsky/Hutch.) These private pleasures
indulge, and hence illuminate, mens and womens differing sexual tastes,
with the men indulging in simulations of no-strings sex with nubile bodies and the women indulging in simulations of deep relationships with
whole people. As Salmon and her former collaborator Donald Symons
have put it, To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex
is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.
The essence of science is not a subject matter or a set of experimental
techniques, but the conviction that our claims about the world are not
matters of personal taste or conviction but can be evaluated for their
degree of truth. A consilient literary analysis should thus pursue some
of the methods of science as well as its theories, and two of the contributions argue that hypotheses in literary scholarship can be as testable
as those in the sciences.
Gottschall examines the common claim from feminist theory that
European fairy tales reflect and perpetuate the arbitrary gender norms
of western patriarchal societies, a corollary of its tenet that gender is a
social construction in its entirety. Using a sample of 658 folk tales from
diverse societies, and a variety of safeguards against bias, he shows that
the incriminating features of European fairy talesactive and heroic
male protagonists, young beautiful female protagonists, older female
antagonistsare in fact found in the folk tales of every culture. Like
the other contributors, Gottschall interprets the resonance of these sex
differences in terms of Darwins theory of sexual selection as elaborated
by Robert Trivers.6 The sex with the greater minimal investment in offspring is selected to be more choosy; the sex with the lesser investment
is selected to be more promiscuous and competitive. In the human
species, our mammalian physiology makes women the greater-investing
sex, though the fact that our males also invest in their offspring blunts
the asymmetry, and makes both sexes compete and choose, though
using different criteria: fertility for men choosing women, ability and
willingness to invest for women choosing men. Gottschall was surprised
to find that an emphasis on finding a suitable marriage partner, unlike
the other traits, was associated with male and female characters in equal
proportions, but I was not surprised. David Busss surveys on sex differences in mating (which several of the contributors cite) shows that
men and women report an equally strong desire to get married.7 This

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isnt, of course, incompatible with the finding that men have a greater
desire for casual sex partners before marriage and after, and is partly
explained by the way that marriage can assuage male sexual jealousy
(itself presumably an adaptation against the evolutionary disaster of
cuckoldry). Marriage is a double-edged bargain: you cant sleep around
with other partners (or at least you shouldnt get caught), but then
neither can your spouse.
Triverss predictions about the optimal mating strategies of each
sex have now been subdivided into strategies for long-term and for
short-term liaisons, which in the case of womens mate preferences
can diverge substantially (see Buss, 1994). When it comes to short-term
affairs, women should prefer fit, dominant men, who can provide any
offspring with good genes; when it comes to long-term relationships,
they should prefer nurturing, well-heeled men, who can provide their
offspring with care and resources (the two ideals are sometimes called
cads and dads. The psychologists Daniel Kruger and Maryanne Fisher,
together with the literature scholar Ian Jobling, propose that the kinds
of men are the archetypes for the two kinds of hero long recognized in
British romantic fiction: the proper hero (a sensitive, decent mensch)
and the dark hero (a dominant, dashing outlaw). The women in
their study, as they had predicted, reported that they would prefer to
hook up sexually with the dark heroes, but that they liked the proper
heroes more, and would prefer them as long-term partners, husbands,
and sons-in-law.
The throbbing question about fiction from an evolutionary viewpoint
is what, if anything, it is for. I believe that most people misunderstand
the question, and in How the Mind Works I tried to clarify it. Having been
embroiled in scores of discussions on the topic since then, Ive found
that almost everyone connected with the arts (including music, literature, and painting) believes that it is important to show that art is an
adaptation, that there is good evidence that art in fact is an adaptation,
and that the function of art is some version of bringing the community
together. I think all three beliefs are false, and that ultimately they may
damage this nascent field. A glib acceptance of them could embolden
the many critics who would love to strangle this discipline in its cradle,
using the clichd criticism of evolutionary theories, namely that they
are a bunch of after-the-fact just-so stories. Only in this case, the critics
would be right.
I sense that most people involved with the arts want them to be an
adaptation because they feel it would somehow validate or ennoble the

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artsperhaps even protect them against budget-conscious politicians

seeking to cut them from school curricula. Part of the problem is an
ambiguity in the word itself. In the common vernacular, adaptive is a
good thing; it means healthy, clever, well-adjusted. In the biologists
technical sense, though, it refers only to a trait that evolved because,
compared to alternative versions of the traits, it increased the rate of
reproduction of an organisms ancestors. Biological adaptations need
not be praiseworthy by human standards. Quite the contrary. As Symons
has pointed out, a willingness to commit genocide may very well be an
adaptation, whereas the ability to read almost certainly is not. The arts
could be evolutionary by-products, and be among the most valuable
human activities for all that.
To demonstrate that X is an adaptation, one cant simply show that
people like doing X, or that good things happen when people do X.
This is circular; a restatement of the fact that people tend to do X.
Instead, one has to showindependently of anything we know about the
human behavior in questionthat X, by its intrinsic design, is capable
of causing a reproduction-enhancing outcome in an environment
like the one in which humans evolved. This analysis cant be a kind of
psychology; it must be a kind of engineeringan attempt to lay down
the design specs of a system that can accomplish a goal (specifically, a
subgoal of reproduction) in a particular world (specifically, the ancestral
environment). With these design specs in hand, one can then compare
the specs against the facts of the human drive or talent we are trying
to explain. The closer the design specs match the empirical facts about
human beings, the more confidence we have that the trait in question
is an adaptation.
Example: Why do people crave sweets? Bad answers: because sweets
give people pleasure, makes them feel satisfied; because eating sweets
communally (at birthday parties, dates, and so on) brings people
together. Better answer: because sugars contain accessible energy (a fact
of chemistry), because the fruits of certain plants are rich in sugar (a fact
of botany), because primates evolved in ecosystems with fruit-rich plants
(a fact of paleoecology). Ergo, a drive to find and consume sweets would
have provided an ancestral organism with energy, which is a prerequisite
to reproduction. With other putative adaptations, different fields might
provide the relevant engineering analysis: robotics for motor control,
reproductive biology for sexual drives, Mendelian genetics for kinship
emotions, game theory for cooperation and competition.
What about the arts? We can immediately see that any supposed

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f unction that appeals only to the effects we observe post hoc in people
wont cut it. Perhaps singing lullabies soothes babies; perhaps dancing relieves tension; perhaps shared stories bond the community. The
question is, why would anyone have predicted, a priori, that people
would be constituted in such a way that these things would happen?
What exactly is it about a sequence of tones in certain rhythmic and
harmonic relations that would lead a baby to ease up on its demands
for parental attention (compared to any other signal), and whats in it
for the baby? In the case of fiction, why should communally recounted
falsehoods about characters and events that never occurred make people
any more attached to one another than they would otherwise find it in
their interests to be? Its not that these questions are necessarily unanswerable, but they do need answers, and the answers cannot simply
repeat what we already know about peoples tendency to produce and
consume works of art.
Appealing to this logic, I proposed that many of the arts may have
no adaptive function at all. They may be by-products of two other traits:
motivational systems that give us pleasure when we experience signals
that correlate with adaptive outcomes (safety, sex, esteem, information-rich environments), and the technological know-how to create
purified and concentrated doses of these signals (such as landscape
paintings, erotica, or hero stories). Fiction may be, at least in part, a
pleasure technology, a co-opting of language and imagery as a virtual
reality device which allows a reader to enjoy pleasant hallucinations
like exploring interesting territories, conquering enemies, hobnobbing
with powerful people, and winning attractive mates. Fiction, moreover,
can tickle peoples fancies without even having to project them into a
thrilling vicarious experience. There are good reasons for people (or
any competitive social agent) to crave gossip, which is a kind of due
diligence on possible allies and enemies. Fiction, with its omniscient
narrator disclosing the foibles of interesting virtual people, can be a
form of simulated gossip.
Unlike other art forms, I think that fiction lends itself to at least a
prima facie case that it is also an adaptation. I mentioned that a true
adaptationist hypothesis needs an engineering analysis to provide it
with a source of a priori predictionsin effect, reasons why a designer
would want to build the trait into a robot (or other artificial life form)
that had to survive and reproduce in a humanlike ecosystem. I was
impressed, then, by an essay by the artificial intelligence researcher Jerry
Hobbs that began with the question, Will robots ever have literature?8

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Hobbs argued that they might. Intelligent systems often best reason by
experiment, real or simulated: they set up a situation whose outcome
they cannot predict beforehand, let it unfold according to fixed causal
laws, observe the results, and file away a generalization about how what
becomes of such entities in such situations. Fiction, then, would be a kind
of thought experiment, in which agents are allowed to play out plausible interactions in a more-or-less lawful virtual world, and an audience
can take mental notes of the results. Human social life would be a ripe
domain for this experiment-driven learning because the combinatorial
possibilities in which their goals may coincide and conflict (cooperating
or defecting in prisoners dilemmas, seeking long-term or short-term
mating opportunities, apportioning resources among offspring) are
so staggeringly vast as to preclude strategies for success in life being
either built-in innately or learnable from ones own limited personal
experience. Since they are products of the imagination, fictitious plots
are cheap and abundant, and can sample large regions of the space of
important human interactions. Whether or not they have ever taken
place among real humans is immaterial to their instructive value, as long
as they preserve some degree of fidelity to the causal structure of the
real world. An analogy would be the way that experts in chess (another
domain with a combinatorial explosion of possible interactions) study
transcripts of thousands of actual games rather than simply memorizing
generic strategies like get your queen out early.
The point can be broadened. Generic strategies for success are as
useless in life as they are in chess (Buy low, sell high; He who hesitates
is lost; Look before you leap; and so on). The problem with these maxims is that in applying them to real situations, the devil is in the details.
Some artificial intelligence researchers believe that usable information
about the world is often best stored and accessed in highly concrete
scenarios. An entire configuration of relevant details is spelled out and
recorded in memory, and the reasoner, when faced with a new scenario,
searches in memory for the stored case whose constellation of details
is most similar to the current one.9 This is called case-based reasoning, and it motivates the idea that humans might cognitively profit by
observing plausible scenarios through fiction. It could be useful even
in relatively simple cases that dont involve intricate plots exemplifying higher-order combinatorial interactions. If so, this would give an
independent computational motivation for the frequent suggestion that
fiction often serves a didactic function, implicitly teaching readers the
rules of their social and cultural milieu.

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The idea that fiction is both an adaptation and a by-product is not

new; it is implicit in the old saying that the purpose of literature is to
delight and instruct. Putting together the various suggestions leads to
the picture below.
This taxonomy, needless to say, leaves many questions unanswered,
but I think it organizes the viable hypotheses (not mutually exclusive)
about the biological function of fiction. And it helps introduce the
three remaining essays, each of which explores the evolutionary function of fiction.
The literary scholar and Nabokov expert Brian Boyd presents an
incisive overview and critique of evolutionary theories of art (including
mine) and a defense of his own favorite: that art is no by-product, but
has the dual function of fostering social cohesion (an idea he credits to
the scholar Ellen Dissanayake) and of engaging attention. Boyd rightly
criticizes an alternative theory of the function of arts from the psychologist Geoffrey Miller in which art is a costly signal of the neural fitness
of the artist, a kind of cognitive peacocks tale.10 Boyd points out that
this theory falsely predicts that art should be produced and consumed
primarily in the context of courtship. I agree with the criticism, though
it must be said that Millers theory at least passes the test of being a logically coherent, noncircular adaptationist hypothesis. The same cannot
be said for the social-cohesion theory, because we have been given no a
priori reason to predict that the sharing of imaginary events would be
an efficacious way for the members of a social species to stay together

Why We Tell Stories

Delight (by-product)

Virtual
reality
(vicarious
experience)

Simulated
gossip

Instruct (adaptation)

Case-based
reasoning
about local
sociocultural
norms

Thought
experiments
about
combinatorial
game-theoretic
interactions

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(compared to drawing circles in the air, reciting prime numbers, banging

elbows, and so on)other than that we know that our species seems to
do it that way. (To say nothing of the issues papered over by the assumption that social cohesion is an evolutionary desideratum, a problem
I will return to.) A similar problem faces the suggestion that shared
attention is the evolutionary function of fiction. It begs the question
of whats so adaptive about sharing attention, particularly attention to
events that never happened, other than that people like to do it.
The remaining two essays more or less make the case for the delight
and instruct theories, respectively. The psychology lecturer and former playwright and actor Daniel Nettle argues for the simulated-gossip
theory (using metaphors like recreational drugs and the ethologists
supernormal stimulus), pointing to the intensively social nature of
Homo sapiens and the intrigues it embroils us in. This is a backdrop
to his concise rich analysis of drama (particularly the plays of Shakespeare), which includes a helpful 2 X 2 taxonomy of its major forms:
Conflicts of Status versus Mating, crossed with Positive versus Negative
Resolutions for the protagonist (a tragedy is a Conflict of Status with a
Negative Outcome, a heroic drama involves Status Conflict + Positive
Outcome, a love tragedy involves Mating Conflict + Negative Outcome,
and a Comedy involves Mating Conflict + Positive Outcome.
The literature scholar Michele Scalise Sugiyama emphasizes the
instruct function, pointing to the ways in which fiction allows audiences
to acquire information, rehearse strategies, and refine skills relevant to
resolving human goals in conflict. She is the only contributor who systematically brings research in cognitive science to the table, including
story grammars (the rules of narrative structure) and theory of mind (the
way people think as intuitive psychologists). And remarkably, she is the
only contributor to point out that the medium of literature is language;
most of the theories in the book would apply perfectly well to movies or
television. For that reason, she notes, an analysis of linguistic processes
is also essential to a full understanding of the psychology of fiction.
So what are the prospects for a new, consilient field of literary scholarship? The Literary Animal, of course, is meant to inaugurate the field
and show its promise; it cant be a showcase of mature work. But as rich
and insightful as the essays in The Literary Animal are (Ive hardly done
them justice), they left me feeling that the promissory foundations of
the field need some more thinking through. Here is my unsolicited
advice for some of the things that Darwinian lit-crit must do before it is
ready to storm the citadel of contemporary literary studies.

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(1) The goal of explaining the human taste for fiction (a problem
in evolutionary psychology) sits uneasily with the goal of improving the
analysis and criticism of specific works of fiction (a problem in departments of English and other literatures). Its conceivable that evolutionary
thinking will raise, and eventually solve, the scientific question of why
we enjoy fiction without offering anything to the field of literary criticism beyond our folk theories of human nature. (Under this scenario,
evolution would explain why those folk theories are true, but would not
add anything to the power of those theories to illuminate specific works
of literature.) I dont think it will come down to this, but advocates
of Darwinian lit-crit should be prepared to spell out what they hope
evolution will add to literary analysis beyond a rehabilitation of the
relevance of a conception of human nature. This in turn may require
a more explicit rationale of what literary criticism itself is for, and why
we attach so much importance to itthe kind of justification that many
humanities scholars find philistine and demeaning, but that scientists
are forced to muster every time they write a grant proposal.
(2) Theories of the possible evolutionary functions of fiction need
to be sharpened so that they approach the standards of evolutionary
biology itself, and dispel the canard that evolutionary theories can never
rise above just-so-stories.11 As Ive emphasized, this requires thinkers to
look outside fiction, and outside psychology, to the kinds of engineering analysis that could rationalize the possible benefits to an intelligent
social agent of exploring fictitious worlds. Darwinian literature scholars
who want to show that fiction is a cognitive adaptation thus should
look more closely at research in Artificial Intelligence on the design
of intelligent systems. Its also possible that some day the information
will flow in both directions, and that AI researchers will consult literary
scholars for insight into how to make computers smarter by exploring
hypothetical worlds the way people do.
(3) In this vein, a consilient literary scholarship should avail itself
not only of evolutionary psychology but of the other sciences of human
nature: artificial intelligence on the nature of intelligent systems, cognitive science on visual imagery and theory of mind, linguistics on the use
of language to narrate plots and control readers attention, behavioral
genetics on the development of personality and its dimensions of variation, social psychology on the biases that govern our behavior in groups
and our limited awareness of them.12 Even the topics in evolutionary
psychology that are brought in to this volume fall into a narrow range
centered on mating and sex differences, leaving out such potentially

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fecund topics for literature as parent-offspring conflict, sibling rivalry,

self-deception, reciprocity, taboo, coalitional psychology, and the moral
emotions.
(4) The seldom-analyzed difference between high culture on the one
hand and low and middlebrow culture is something of an embarrassment for research in the psychology of the arts. For one thing, though
Darwinian literary critics aspire to invoke human universals to explain
the arts, their professional standards and their personal tastes may lead
them to study forms of art that appeal to 1% of the population (people
like themselves) and to ignore the forms that appeal to 99%. Also, since
highbrow and avant-garde genres often define themselves in defiant
opposition to low- and middlebrow culture, and to the high culture of a
previous period, they are bound to refute just about any generalization
of the nature of art that anyone will ever make. Psychologically-oriented
scholars of literature will have to get used to some slumming, or at least
give some attention to the variables that differentiate forms of literature
with different levels of popularity and prestige, if for no other reason
than to eliminate a source of uncontrolled variance in the phenomena
they are studying.
(5) Several of the contributors (especially Nettle, Fox, Carroll, and
Scalise Sugiyama) rightly focus on the ways that fiction explores a
characters struggle to negotiate conflicting goals within themselves
and among one another. The traditional idea from literary analysis
that plot is driven by conflict is a natural complement to the idea from
evolutionary psychology that partial conflicts of interest are inherent
to all social relationshipsparent and offspring, sibling and sibling,
spouse and spouse, man and woman, cooperator and cooperator, ally
and ally, rival and rival, even one part of the self and another. The
partial conflicts that our biology makes us heir to are far richer with
combinatorial possibilities than either pure overlap of interest (as in
clonal organisms, or the cells of a body) or pure conflict of interest (as
in predator and prey). They have much to do with the fact that plots
in fiction are open-ended and eternally fascinating, rather than a fixed
repertoire of features of human nature put on display and endlessly
recycled. Darwinian lit-crit should zero in on the logic of these conflicts
with the help of evolutionary game theory, and use them as building
blocks for the analysis of plot and character.
(6) For similar reasons, evolutionary literary analysts should be far
more skeptical of the idea that group cohesion is a basic human
motive and that it can be readily explained by group selection. Group

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177

selection fell out of favor among evolutionary biologists with the sociobiological revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, though D. S. Wilson is
trying to resuscitate it. Within biology, its still unclear whether Wilsons
concept of group selection adds anything to the idea that a group is
part of the environment in which some organisms are selected, or that
a set of cooperating or related organisms can redundantly be dubbed
a group. Both of these unexceptionable suggestions are very different
from the precise meaning of group selection in which the traits of
a group qua group (size, structure, cohesion, division of labor), separate from the properties of the individuals making up that group, are
selected across iterated cycles of high-fidelity replication in the way that
genes are. More to the point, the gluey metaphors inspired by group
selection (bonding, social cohesion, and so on) dont do justice to the
ambivalent mixture of selfish, nepotistic, strategic, and self-advertising
motives that really animate a persons feelings toward his or her group,
and that fiction deliciously plays out for us. People in social groups are
not like ants in a colony, cells in a body, or components of a well-oiled
machine. I think John Updike got it right when he said, Fiction, in its
groping way, is drawn to those moments of discomfort when society asks
more than its individual members can, or wish to, provide. Ordinary
people experiencing friction on the page is what warms our hands and
hearts as we write.
Despite these reservations, I found The Literary Animal to be an exciting book. It isnt often that one can be present at the genesis of a new
field of knowledge, especially one with the promise of connecting two
realmsthe exploration of human nature by science and by artthat
clearly have so much to learn from each other.
Harvard University

1.See, e.g., Carl Woodring, Literature : An Embattled Profession (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999); Brian Boyd, Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture Critiques Cultural
Critique, American Scholar (Autumn 2006): 1830; and the articles cited in Steven Pinker,
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), p. 400.
2.Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate.
3. Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,

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1995); Brian Boyd, Getting It All Wrong; Denis Dutton, Delusions of Postmodernism,
Literature and Aesthetics 2 (1992): 2335.
4.Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 20810; Dan Sperber, Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations, Man
20 (1985): 7389; Donald Symons, On the Use and Misuse of Darwinism in the Study
of Human Behavior, in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of
Culture, ed. J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992); John Maynard Smith and N. Warren, Models of Cultural and Genetic Change,
in Games, Sex, and Evolution, ed. J. M. Smith (New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1988);
Margo Daly, Some Caveats about Cultural Transmission Models, Human Ecology 10
(1982): 4018; A.Norenzayan and S. Atran, Cognitive and Emotional Processes in the
Cultural Transmission of Natural and Nonnatural Beliefs, in The Psychological Foundations
of Culture, ed. M. Schaller and C. Crandall (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, in press).
5. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, On the Universality of Human Nature and the
Uniqueness of the Individual: The Role of Genetics and Adaptation, Journal of Personality 58 (1990): 1767.
6.Robert Trivers, Parental Investment and Sexual Selection, in Sexual Selection and
the Descent of Man, ed. B. Campbell (Chicago: Aldine, 1972).
7. D. M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
8. J. R Hobbs, Literature and Cognition (Stanford: Center for the Study of Language
and Information, 1990).
9. C. Riesbeck and R. C. Schank, Inside Case-based Reasoning (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum,
1989).
10. Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human
Nature (New York: Doubleday, 2000).
11. G. C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Donald Symons, On the
Use and Misuse of Darwinism in the Study of Human Behavior, in The Adapted Mind:
Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome H. Barkow, Lisa Cosmides,
and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); H. K. Reeve and P. W. Sherman, Adaptation and the Goals of Evolutionary Research, Quarterly Review of Biology
68 (1993): 132.
12.See the references in The Blank Slate, pp. 41718.